A One-Question Survey…

A One-Question Survey…

Adam Kirsch had this to say about Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural performance: “[T]he poet’s place is not on the platform but in the crowd […], she should speak not for the people but to them.”

This seems to me obscurity dressed up as profundity; the more I turn it over the less sense it makes. But how does it strike you? True or false? True and false? Neither true nor false?

Regardless, Kirsch seems to beg questions related to power—political and poetic—and to prescribe the status quo: poets speaking “to” rather than “for,” “in the crowd” (which crowd? the crowd that listens when poets speak?), where no one in power can hear them.

9 Comments

Of course, speaking to the country in 1860 was a lot different than speaking to it now. In any case, so much seems to depend on the personality of the poet in question. One poet seeks or naturally gravitates toward a public role; another doesn’t but sees it as necessary and wishes he could; another is reclusive and runs from it; another sees it as arrogant, unnecessary, or foolish; and yet

To Baj and Joseph-<BR/><BR/>I seriously doubt the younger Whitman, the one who wrote anonymous "reviews" praising the first edition of Leaves of Grass and had them published in his newspaper and others, the one who had Emerson’s line "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" embossed on the cover of the second edition (without Emerson’s permission), would have passed up the opportunity to

Hey , Baj! You’re right, but I think Kirsch is wrong. As Whitman knew, oratory has great democratic potential and certainly befits (some) presidents. Especially in this case, the case I mean of a president who captured the imaginations of large numbers of people here and around the world, a president whose election represented an historic step forward for the Republic, surely in this case public

Read what Adam Kirsch wrote, then thought about it, and my impression is that if <I>he</I> had been asked to be the inaugural poet/ he would have refused because for him the platform represents oratory, and oratory may befit autocrats but it doesn’t befit presidents.

I had to wrestle with the variations a bit, but it made some sense to me.<BR/><BR/>To be on the platform speaking for the people (with or without irony) I can easily construe as propaganda. Or/related, it could be to make the persona of the poet more important than the words – that the crowd-identity comes together in one entity (the poet, but not the poem) onstage.<BR/><BR/>The poet in the crowd

ABOUT

Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2018, has published 17 books, including a translation of flash fictions by Mexican author Miguel Lupián, and co-edited two anthologies. He lives in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. He teaches at the University of Denver's University College, where he currently directs two programs: Arts & Culture and Global Affairs.